European trans-imperial corporate cooperation in the French colonies

Organised by

• Department of History

When the European Economic Community was established, France, Belgium and the Netherlands still held colonial territories. Italy and West-Germany, for their part, had a recent imperial past, as Italy had lost its colonies after the Second World War and Germany its African possessions in 1919 and its European empire in 1945. With the treaty of Rome, signed in 1957, the Overseas territories of the European countries, as the colonies were now defined, were associated to the Common Market. Starting from the concept of Eurafrica, this thesis examines how Italian and West-German governments, politicians and business circles reconfigured, imagined, and conceptualised borders and interconnections between Africa and Europe. It argues that, during the 1950s, Eurafrica emerged also as a project of European corporate cooperation focused in the economic development of the French empire. A recent strand of literature tends to place Africa at the centre of early European integration, which would be distinguished by clear colonial roots. For what concerns Italy and West Germany, it contends that after the loss of their own empires, they would have seen in Eurafrica and the Europeanization of colonialism a better way to access and control African natural resources. This thesis explores concrete projects of mineral resource extraction, infrastructural building and industrialisation involving Italian and West German corporations in the transforming French empire. Shifting from the realm of political discourse and intellectual thinking about Eurafrica, it argues that, in order to evaluate the relevance of this project, historians need to look at concrete projects of European economic cooperation in the colonies. If the analysis of geopolitical imagination and discourses seems to place Africa at the centre of European Integration, the study of these concrete projects reveals the limit, in terms of practical realisation, of the Eurafrican vision. Decolonization, different corporate and national interests, economic outlooks, and internal strategies for economic development hindered, in reality, forms of cooperation in the French empire, diminishing the importance of Africa also for the European project. The Eurafrican practices of development analysed in this thesis, however, laid the ground for future projects carried out by post-colonial states and formed a basis for the current Chinese engagement with the countries in which a European economic cooperation was imagined at the end of the empires.